Start With What and Why: Three Shifts for Rewiring Your Mind for Success

The thinking that unlocks your next level, whether you're on day one or year twenty

When I was about seven, my grandparents took me to an ice show in Brighton. The skaters were flying around right in front of me, and I spent half the show looking past them into the wings, trying to see what was happening backstage. I can still picture it now.

That curiosity about how things work has followed me through 27 years in business. I can't stay in a hotel without noticing its systems and thinking of a better way to run them. Most entrepreneurs I know are wired the same way. We're problem solvers, which is usually how a business starts in the first place, and it makes us natural strategists.

It's also what trips us up. When you approach your next level of success with how-thinking, you go straight into strategising and looking for steps before you've decided where you're going. The habit gets more stubborn the longer you've been in business, and it's still worth rewinding to the two questions that come first.

Start With What and Why

What does success look like for you? Revenue is vital, because a business you run for free is a hobby, and it still isn't the whole picture. A highly profitable business that leaves you burnt out, miserable or never spending time with the people you love has become a ball and chain, which was never the point of building it.

Get clear enough to see it, whether you write it out in the present tense like a journal entry, draw it, or sit with it and daydream. Then go a step further and notice how it feels. Relieved, proud, hopeful about what it leads to next. When your mind and body agree on what you're moving towards, they stop misfiring and start pulling in the same direction.

Then ask why it matters. Some of your reasons will be about impact, some will be about freedom, flexibility and financial strength, and some will be about the people closest to you. If you're struggling to find it, imagine you'd landed £20 million, invested so that it pays you forever. If you'd still do this work, ask yourself why, and you'll find the reason that runs deepest.

Park the how for a while. In my experience it presents itself, and almost unfolds in front of you once what and why are straight.

Make Fear Your Plus One

Fear is coming along for the ride whether you invite it or not, so make it your plus one. It sits in the passenger seat and you do the driving. Sometimes it'll tap you on the shoulder for good reason and you'll thank it for having your back. Other times you'll tell it, "shh, grown-ups are speaking."

Fear loves a what-if. What if I look silly, what if I make a mistake, who am I to do this when ten people are better at it than me. The question I'd rather you sit with is whether you'll reach the end of your days wishing you hadn't let that voice keep you quiet or play it safe.

Years ago I went to a casting for a TV programme as the founder of an infant sleep business. Someone in the room asked me, "Aren't you a bit glamorous to be a sleep expert?" I wasn't brave or quick enough to answer it then, and I'd love to go back and ask what they meant. Comments like that teach us to hide the thing about us that's a little bit magic, when that thing might be our greatest asset.

The Power of Yet

When someone further ahead makes you wonder why you'd bother, add the word yet. Nobody refuses to train as a hairdresser because great hairdressers already exist. As I said on the podcast, "No one's ever thinking that job's done."

Everyone you admire had a day one, a first testimonial and a first year of experience, and it builds faster than you'd expect. They're also talking to a different person, packaging their offer in a different way and serving their own market. I've started from nothing next to the recognised number one in a field and gone beyond where they were, because I came at it in my own way. You can do the same, and you have to start in order to get there.

These three principles never go away. They change shape as you grow, and sometimes it helps to have someone remind you how you got where you are in the first place.

If this resonates, I invite you to listen to the full episode here: Born To Be Brilliant Podcast

If you'd like to go deeper into this work and apply it alongside other entrepreneurs, eSCHOOL is your place for that. Find out more here: Entrepreneurs School